Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

visitors who came over the weeks that followed, complete strangers who kissed Do Yeon-ssi’s hands or left the tiniest and stripiest kittens imaginable at her feet and thanked her for “saving their lives”) that she’d decided it was probably best not to associate with her gin rummy crowd anymore. But she missed them, I suppose. We had played whist with her whenever we could find a suitable fourth player, but that’s a very tame setup if you prefer to play cards for real estate, works of art, or cancellation of others’ debt. So out went the whist-playing nephews and in rushed the revellers.

“Anyway, listen, your friend’s here with us, so I’m sure you’ll get a full report later,” said Do Yeon-ssi.

“Which friend?” I asked, and Xavier asked, “One of mine, or one of Otto’s?” As if his friends are more virtuous.

We heard Do Yeon-ssi asking if she could finally tell us, then she announced: “It’s Yuri!”

“Oh … Yuri …,” we said, exchanging blank looks.

“I have to say, it’s nice having him around. Just … easy, you know? Not your usual style at all. I thought you went for angsty types.”

Any response Yuri might have been making was swallowed up by what sounded like a full string orchestra playing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

I started to tell Do Yeon-ssi I didn’t know any Yuri, but a message flashed up on the screen, and Xavier took the phone from me before I had time to read it. All I saw was that it wasn’t from a saved contact: the full phone number was displayed. Xavier read the message, then asked: “Er, how did you guys meet?”

Something (or an inebriated someone) crashed to the floor very close to Do Yeon-ssi, there was a hubbub around her, and she said: “What? What? I can’t hear you.”

“I was asking how you and Yuri met,” Xavier said.

“Almost got bathed in hot gumbo from a soup tureen … and now you’re asking how I met your friend? What do you think is going on? A toy boy and sugar mummy dating service introduced us, something like that? Just keep on thinking that way if you want to …”

Xavier glanced at me for confirmation, then said: “It’s just that we don’t know—”

Another text message arrived. He looked at it and finished, “… what we’d do without Yuri.”

Clearly he now had some idea who Yuri was. Yet he frowned when Do Yeon-ssi told us the party had been Yuri’s idea. To help her unwind. And when it was revealed that she’d asked this very same Yuri about honeymoon ideas and he’d put her in touch with Ava Kapoor, Xavier was livid. “Yeah, he’s a nonstop lifestyle guy, Yuri,” I said into the phone. “That’s what we love about him. Could you put him on for a sec?”

Surprise, surprise: Yuri had been right at her elbow just a second ago, but somebody had whisked him away. What could Do Yeon-ssi say, Yuri was popular. She’d tell him to give us a call: “And don’t forget to thank him for the train idea. Right, I’ve got to go. What did you want again? Ah yes, a phone number. I’ll text it to you in—”

Xavier’s phone signal flatlined. I left the compartment to check the corridor window: we were going through a tunnel. Once we were out the other side, he followed me into the corridor, switching his handset off and then on again.

“Still no signal?”

“Hang on … nope. Lucky for Yuri.”

“Our dear, dear friend Yuri. Working tirelessly day and night to guarantee that everyone’s relaxed and having fun.”

He tapped the corner of his phone against his teeth, thinking. “That’s the thing: it could be genuinely benevolent meddling. Maybe we do owe him a thank-you. But there’s something fucked up about having to await outcomes before deciding whether to be nasty or nice.”

We’d taken the southeastern-bound train from our station hundreds of times and had thought it’d be the same old route at least until we reached Ashford. Yet here we were puttering along between two heavily weathered stone circles. They were nothing close to Stonehenge height—these circles rose from a field of mud-matted grass that stood almost as tall as they did—in fact they were the height of, well, your average gravestone. No, they were gravestones. As we passed we saw that these rings were set concentrically and that they ran deep. “Did you know that we lived this close to something like this?” I asked Xavier. He shook his head, checked his phone screen one more time—still no messages and no signal—then pointed towards the back of the train. “Right, I’ll look for Ava that way. See you back here in a bit?”

That meant I was the one who’d approach the driver’s carriage. I called out to Árpád, but he’d curled up in the corner of his window seat and had apparently gone to sleep. I put an ear to his snout. Definitely just sleeping. As I straightened up, a patch of the darkness behind me got darker. The sensation was similar to the one you get when someone’s staring at you, someone close by but out of your line of sight. I turned around and started to say something, thinking Xavier had come back in. But it was just me and the sleeping mongoose. Xavier had already moved on to the next carriage: I heard him shouting, “Ms. Kapoor? Ms. Kapoor?”

I’d left the compartment door ajar, and now it was closed. I didn’t have any specific ideas about this, but I was unhappy with the order in which I’d noticed the changes. The door closes and it gets darker, fine, but it gets darker and then the door closes? No thanks. Thumbs down to whatever mentality I’d boarded this train with, and another thumbs down to this door-and-darkness thing occurring almost as soon as Xavier left me. See—even the term I used … left me. Never mind that he had gone to see if somebody needed help—I’d